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A Way to Remember: Celebrating Grandma Jane’s Birthday

Every year on this day for the last six years I’ve tried to figure out how best to remember her. The first year after she died I placed a picture of her in the breast pocket of my shirt before I went off to work. Another year my brother, sister, stepfather, and I each went out and bought yellow flowers. Three years ago I made zucchini bread, my favorite of all the things she liked to bake.

None of these gestures ever felt right to me. I think the problem was less in the pictures, the flowers, or the bread than in the nature of the day itself. Anything I could do in honor of her birthday felt insignificant compared with how much I missed her. That insignificance had the effect of accentuating her absence and I worried that I was failing to commemorate her in the right way. As a result, I always felt a small sense of relief when my mom’s birthday had passed.

But today, for the first time since her death, I woke up eager to celebrate her birthday. In fact, for more than a week I’ve been talking with Jay about how Grandma Jane’s Birthday is coming up soon.

A little before 8am I propped Jay on his changing pad and tried to tell him a few things about his grandma. It was hard to know what to say so instead I demonstrated how hard Grandma Jane would have hugged him and I told him that she would have given him so many kisses he would have never been able to wipe all of them off. (Jay relishes wiping off the kisses that Caroline and I give him.) Then I tried to explain just how much Grandma Jane would have loved him if she were still alive.

After dinner we sang happy birthday and Jay got a cup of ice cream. While he was eating it Caroline brought over a photo that we keep on the fridge, taken just before my sister’s rehearsal dinner in 2006. Caroline asked Jay to point out Grandma Jane, which he did. Then a few minutes later, as he was scraping up the last of his ice cream with his spoon, he picked up the picture again.

Jay doesn’t understand, I don’t think, what death means, but he does know it’s something serious and outside the realm of his experience. I’ve thought hard about how to describe the look on his face whenever he brings up the fact that my mom isn’t alive anymore. It’s seems to me like a combination of bravery and an intent desire to understand.

After ice cream we opened presents. A few years ago my sister initiated the tradition of exchanging gifts on our mom’s birthday by sending Jay an illustrated version of Wynken, Blynken, and Nod, a lullaby our mom sang to us when we were young. This year we sent her one-year-old son Peter his first Grandma Jane’s Birthday present: A paper punch that makes cutouts in the shape of a butterfly.

Caroline, Jay, Wally, and I sat on the floor in the living room. We opened Wally’s present first. It was a book about animals that has textured pages, so you can feel the deer’s rubbery nose and the baby bunny’s soft fur.

Then we opened the box containing Jay’s gift. It was a kid-sized chef’s toque. I thought it was cute and appropriate given how much my mom liked to bake, but Jay, after a week of eyeballing the sealed box, was underwhelmed. He discarded the toque and grabbed at Wally’s book. Several times during the rest of the evening I heard him say to himself, “Why did I get a chef’s hat?” When I called my sister tonight to tell her about his reaction we laughed so hard we cried.

I know there’s only so much I can do to make my mom a part of Jay and Wally’s lives. If it’s hard as a kid to comprehend how much your parents love you, it’s close to impossible to appreciate how much someone you never met would have. To a large extent Grandma Jane will always be an abstraction to Jay and Wally, someone they see in photographs and hear their dad talk about but not more than that.

Jay and Wally may never know how much their grandma would have loved them but that doesn’t mean she has to be completely absent from their lives. Joining her memory to the giving of presents and the eating of ice cream seems like a good start. I hope her birthday will become a family holiday and that the force of tradition will help Jay and Wally keep in their lives a person who by every measure but physical proximity is an essential part of who they are.

For me, celebrating my mom’s birthday with Jay and Wally has meant something else: A chance to think about her in joyful terms that let me feel closer to her than I can when I try to approach her memory directly.

It’s close to bedtime in Ann Arbor but I don’t want to turn out the lights just yet. It feels good to be able to say that I’m not quite ready to see my mom’s birthday go.

Glad you enjoyed her birthday with your family. We recently lost our grandma (the kids great grandma) on my wife’s side, and tonight we had the amazing opportunity for our kids to meet their great grandparents from down South. Time together is so precious, isn’t it?

Thanks for sharing this. My wife and I are expecting our first in the fall and her father passed away this year just before Thanksgiving. I know it’s hard for her to think about our children not getting to know her dad, their grandpa, but this is an idea of something we can do to share his memory in a positive, happy way. Happy belated birthday to your Mom.

The sheer love and emotion of this brought me to tears. Of course the essence of your homage to Jane was the observation that, through you, Jane’s loving impact is an essential part of who Jay and Wally are.

I love how you are celebrating your Mom’s life with your son. I have done the same with my now 17-year old son, not only on her birthday, but on all holidays and just any time it occurs to me. My Mom passed away when my son was 2-weeks old, so he has only known her through my stories and my pictures. When he was young, I only told him the happy stories. As he gets older, I have continued the practice and have added in the lessons she taught me, and all the little day-to-day things like “She managed to get supper on the table every night at 6pm sharp, regardless of what else was going on.” My son and I joke that I can’t manage to do that. I also cook him my favorite foods that she used to cook for me, and I convince him to try them at least once, to honor his Grandmother. (this has proven to be a good technique to cajole him to try new foods like fish chowder).

Thank you for that comment, Sue. I hope, as my boys get older, I am able to deepen their understanding of their grandmother in the same way you’ve been able to teach your son about your mom. And my mom loved fish chowder, too- with a grilled blueberry muffin when she could get one.

Thank you for such an amazingly written story. My father died the day after my husband and I were married. We found out that we were pregnant with my first son 6 weeks later. I share stories of my father with my two boys- now 6 and 4- all the time. I especially love letting them both know how they remind me of him. I love the idea of presents and ice cream on a departed loved one’s birthday. My father would have been 65 this December. I can’t wait to share that day with them.

Happy belated birthday to your mother. She must have been a remarkable woman to inspire such beautiful thoughts and sentiments in those she left behind. You and your family are truly blessed.